that’s whacked

seoul photos, now with new and improved context

Friday, Nov 24. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos

I finally got around to captioning and describing all my photos from my trip to Seoul for Tech Days from two weeks ago.

initial impressions and random ramblings

Saturday, Nov 4. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Travel

got in to the hotel last night @ around 20:30.

• stayed awake the entire flight (watched 4 movies, synced up the PG gate to snv50, live-upgraded to snv51, reinstalled frkit, and failed miserably to write better documentation on the Teamware->Mercurial bridge. note to all fr4k users: lugging 3 batteries in your carry-on is totally worth it)

• once i got to the hotel, i did some much-needed stretching/not-really-yoga (i say not-really-yoga, because i don’t think traditionally yoga is practiced while drinking beer) to get my back unkinked from the flight.

• paid the ridiculous 25,000 W/day (~$28 US) for Internet access (what a rip-off. i should see when dp/jimgris get here if we can get adjacent rooms and use my travel wireless router i brought).

• wandered into the COEX Mall late last night (~11pm?) to try and find some grub (of the edible kind, not the boot loader kind. wow. it was still pretty busy. ate some soba, and wandered through the arcade, where i had the following random three observations:

  • is it common for couples to wear matching or identical shirts/outfits?
  • girls play arcade games.
  • why is everyone so dressed up?

• i punched-in to Sun’s network, latency to sfbay is pretty reasonable… and was greeted by a flurry of messages through friday of various opensolaris.org machines being down, non-responsive, etc. etc. looks like i picked a good day to miss work

anyway. it’s 7:37am sunday morning here. i just had some great coffee at the breakfast buffet downstairs and i’m waiting for a friend to get here (who also happens to coincidentally be in Seoul this week) so we can go checkout the city.

i’m torn. should i go to the knife museum? or the kimchee museum? both are supposed to be wonderfully weird and wacky.

Glassfish goodness

Friday, Oct 20. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

sch and martin have expressed interest in running opensolaris.org off of Glassfish instead of what we currently use: Tomcat.

I needed something interesting to unwind my Friday afternoon, so I thought I’d try it out and see how it worked with OpenGrok.

Wow. That was remarkably painless and easy. I’m impressed. When I have more time, I’ll get around to throwing the Tonic/Jive webapps at it and see if we can get the Sun-on-Sun spirit combined with the “OpenSource-on-Opensource” spirit and get opensolaris.org running on our own dog food.

rebuilding mplayer on nexenta to play wmv9dmo

Saturday, Sep 9. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

i had some .wmv files that wouldn’t play under the default Nexent mplayer package. mplayer just complained that it didn’t recognise the wmv9dmo codec. bummer.

i went to the mplayer website and downloaded the latest source and the essential-codecs package for x86. here’s what i had to do to get mplayer building so i could play my wmv9dmo files:

• apt-get install xlibs-dev sunwaudh gcc make
• ./configure –prefix=~ –enable-xv –enable-x11 –enable-sunaudio
• gmake all
• gmake install

the xlibs-dev and sunwaudh packages threw me off for a while.

a cross-disciplinary productive day

Saturday, Sep 9. 2006  –  Category: Code, Music, OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Pets

i’ve had a fun day catching up on all sorts of little odds and ends i’d had on my to do list.

• finished the final step in my migration of all my users’ home directories and web-space to ZFS.
• setup drupal and started building the portal for my neighbourhood. our neighbourhood improvement association was blowing away $45/month on crappy webhosting for a phpBB installation that kept getting hacked, and a mailman list. it’d frustrated me long enough that i finally volunteered to be the webmaster. i’m in the process of building a new website from scratch that will be a full portal to our neighbourhood and provide blogs, message boards, mailing lists, and web space to any resident, organisation/club, or store in our neighbourhood
• did lots of research on various brake pads for my A4. i’m planning on replacing my front brake pads tomorrow. it’s been tough finding a good recommended brake pad that has a firm bite, not-as-much brake dust, and a proper connection for a wear sensor. i’m finding that it’s hard to find a good firm sport brake that will endure my, shall we say, vigorous, driving that also has a wear sensor.
• installed bugzilla on grommit. i finally got tired of hearing about our bug database sucking, and the points about project bug-tracking for externally driven projects (like ksh93) are perfectly valid. yes i realise there is much to be done on b.o.o., but due to the process, policy, and implementation of Sun’s bug tracking system, there are lot more constraints of b.o.o. i do intend to help internally anyway i can to make it better; but in the meantime, hopefully the bugzilla install will let external projects start tracking bugs and just make progress

my random thoughts for the day:

• the new vienna teng cd is incredible. her voice has definitely matured since her first two CDs. the music is less raw now, a little more polished/produced. this is neither good, nor bad… just different. the CD is brilliant. highly recommended.
• there’s nothing quite like a freshly bathed beagle as your soft/plush pillow when you’re taking a nap. lovely.
• it’s getting colder and gloomier out now. i took the dogs to Pt. Isabel, and actually had to wear a beanie. this was also my first official soft-shell-jacket wear of the season. it’s definitely fall.
• i’d always known Pt. Isabel was big… i didn’t realise it was the largest off-leash dog park in the nation. wow. go east bay parks
• the chili/sourdough baguette at the cafe at Pt. Isabel rocks. highly recommended.

libumem ported to linux/windows

Monday, Mar 13. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

from Wez Furlong’s blog:

Since Solaris is OpenSourced under the CDDL, we were able to incorporate the allocator into Ecelerity and port it to Linux and Windows and not be forced to open-up our entire source-code.

see, now that’s cool. and a brilliant example of why commercial open source works. take something. extend it. make it better. release the source code. and build a product out of it (or around it in this case) and not worry about getting your ass sued.

subversion: all or none?

Friday, Dec 23. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

i think i’ve got the incremental “squelch”-ing working now, so i can maintain a per-putback squelched workspace that mirrours ON. this puts us one step closer to being able to do nightly source syncs.

my next step is to somehow mirrour this over to Subversion. i’m running into a problem though… Subversion requires you to checkout whole directories. you can’t just checkout/edit one file. this isn’t a problem when you’re editing usr/src/cmd/ps/Makefile - but becomes annoying when you want to edit usr/src/Makefile.master.

why do i have to checkout everything in usr/src? that’s thousands of files i have to unnecessarily checkout when all i want to do is edit one file.

i know SCCS is old - but the more i use other SCMs, the more i like SCCS

what’s upcoming…

Tuesday, Dec 6. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

whenever they fix our AC units and bring our tonic build machine back online, i’ll be able to release the build 28 delivery.. hopefully tomorrow, possibly delayed though depending on the stupid AC unit.

sigh.

the split-gate stuff is looking good. i believe we’re aiming for putback to ON next week which should speed up deliveries considerably. (i’m talking about nightly source/bfu baby!)

thumbs up all around. everyone send kupfer some good karma so we can get this thing putback to ON.

i’m going to be at the Minnesota Government IT Symposium next Tuesday & Wednesday to talk about open source in government, specifically OpenSolaris.

yes. when you’re a tech lead, you get to go to sunnier places, but when you’re a junior engineer, you get to go to St. Paul, MN. oh well. i’ve got my down jacket and thermals ready.

i’m going to be gone all next month. i’ll be taking some vacation the first week and a half going to Langkawi & Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. i’ll be working remotely from Taiwan the rest of the month alternating between Taipei and Hualian. if, by any random chance, people happen to want to talk OpenSolaris, let me know and i’ll be happy to meet anyone.

sccs/make binaries

Wednesday, Nov 16. 2005  –  Category: OpenSource

I just posted the SCCS & make binaries to the Tools community. Hopefully these will be useful for developers and distributions…

they’re covered under the same OpenSolaris Binary License as the other OpenSolaris related binaries… so they are freely redistributable.

forcing the issue

Wednesday, Sep 28. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

I was thinking about user interfaces to all the various commands and utilities I use today, and it amazes me how many programs have a -f, or –force option.

What’s even more astounding is how often I have to use it.

Why? Doesn’t this speak to a more inherent design flaw? Anytime I have to “–force” my program’s behaviour from its normal codepath, then I’m bypassing the program’s logic. This is a concession to the “user always knows best” paradigm. In an ideal world, our software and hardware should act in conjunction to take these kinds of choices away from users. Yeah yeah, the Matrix, blah blah. But seriously, I shouldn’t have to override my program’s default decisions - the program should know what I want.

This is a design flaw that many Unix OS’s suffer from, Solaris included. We have a group, KISS (Keep it Simple Solaris) that is working on this, and other approachability issues. I for one would love to see all these stupid “–force” and “-f” options go away.